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Sunday, August 28, 2016

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, May 1952

What says "adventure" more than a skull wearing a pith helmet? This late issue of ADVENTURE the pulp features a dandy cover by Monroe Eisenberg and stories by F.R. Buckley, William Chamberlain, W.L. Heath, Gordon McCreagh, Albert Richard Wetjen, and John Prescott. This is long past ADVENTURE's glory days but still looks like a pretty darned good magazine to me.

3 comments:

This is a great cover but you are right about Adventure's best years being over. By 1952 they were using reprints and this issue has one of the novelettes reprinted from 1939. By the next year, 1953, the pulp era was over after 753 issues, 1910-1953. The magazine continued as a men's adventure magazine in the larger format like ARGOSY. The end came in 1971 after 3 sorry looking digest format issues.

I just read most of this issue and as Sai points out, it is one of the better later issues, certainly comparable to the forties. But generally speaking, I still think the early 1950's show a decline from the 1940's. The six digest sized issues especially are a disappointment with so many reprints, the smaller page count, and less illustrations.

I do want to second the praise for the Caradosso story by Buckley. He did 38 of them for ADVENTURE during 1924-1953 and most are excellent. They deserve to be reprinted in a collection.